Themes and Variations: An Interview with Ryuichi Sakamoto

Ryuichi Sakamoto Coda is about Ryuichi Sakamoto, sure. But it’s also about two pianos. The first: a grand Yamaha, warped by the tsunami that killed more than 1,600 people after the earthquake in Fukushima on March 11, 2011. Sakamoto presses his fingers to its keys. The instrument sounds off-kilter, haunted, still beautiful somehow. He says it feels like playing “the corpse of a piano that had drowned.”

The second piano is the pristine Steinway in Sakamoto’s West Village apartment, where he composes most of his music. He ponders the existence of the instrument, a thing made possible by the industrial revolution—wood molded into shape by machine, strings coiled through “the sum strength of civilization.” He explains: “We humans say [the piano] falls out of tune. But that’s not exactly accurate. Matter is struggling to return to a natural state.”

Much of Coda is like this—philosophical, often moving. Which is an odd prospect for a documentary, considering how much easier it would have been to do something linear. Chart the the four-decade career of a man who created some of the most foundational pop music of the ‘80s in Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra; follow his move to the U.S. to compose Oscar-caliber movie scores; observe the creation of his most personal album to date, the ambient record async, which wrestles with Sakamoto’s battle with stage-3 throat cancer; at some point, show the clip when he gets kissed by David Bowie in a homoerotic movie about POW camps.

All those things are in Coda, but director Stephen Nomura Schible is less curious about Sakamoto’s career than his ideologies. (The movie isn’t even chronological, narratively more elliptical than anything.) Coda meditates on the tension between nature and technology, and how the creation of music is inherently unnatural, borne somewhere between the state of those two pianos.

As in the movie, Sakamoto is able to thoughtfully and charmingly express these ambiguous ideas. He has more conflicts than answers. Beneath a head of handsomely tousled gray hair and behind a perfect pair of thick-rimmed tortoise-shell glasses, he sips a cappuccino and tells me about his music and the movies that inspired him. (He also dunks on Isle of Dogs.) But first, he explains that Ryuichi Sakamoto Coda wasn’t supposed to be about him, at least not as much as it is. This started as a political movie, one about the anti-nuclear protests following 3/11.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: It was a very rare moment in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear plant accident. Ordinary people went out to the streets to speak anti-nuclear sentiments. That was very rare because Japan didn't have these social movements for the past four decades, since the early '70s.

GQ: Anti-nuclear movements?

Not only anti-nuclear, but any kind of social movements.

Do you feel like that's something distinctly Japanese?

Yeah, it's a huge difference. The Korean people are so, I don't know how should I say...

They ousted their president through protest, right?

Yes. They can bring down their president. I hope American people can do that.

So Coda started as something more political and maybe less centered on you?

Yes, more political than artistic or musical.

And then the cancer diagnosis came sometime when you guys were filming?

Yeah, a few years in.

Did you ever think about not doing the documentary anymore?

Of course. And actually, more so, Mr. Schible really suggested not shooting anymore. But somehow, I kind of encouraged him because I thought myself, Now he has got a very dramatic moment for his film. [laughs]

So you've seen the movie?

Yeah. Many times.

Do you like it?

Well, it's hard to be objective. It's hard to be critical. I'm very shy about seeing my own face on the screen. But, I think the movie handles so many different subjects and materials. And still it's not too long. There are many documentaries that are too long for me. I easily fall asleep during a movie.

When I went into Coda, thinking it was a documentary about you, I just imagined it would start with Yellow Magic Orchestra and end with async. But it's structurally totally different.

I think that was very wise. He spent a lot of time thinking about that. I like that. It's not straight chronological.

He does a lot interesting juxtapositions. There is an insinuated parallel between 9/11 and 3/11.

For us Japanese, 3/11 is a bit like 9/11. Although 3/11 is a natural disaster, and the cause is very different, there is [a similar] magnitude of damage. 9/11 is human, [and it came from] very strong sentiment of anti-capitalism. 3/11 is not the same sentiment, but the nature is the strong emblem, strength of the anti-human civilization. Somehow that’s parallel to me.

9/11, that's the U.S. reckoning with a lot of terrible things that we’ve done. Maybe not all Americans believe that. But on some level, 3/11 is similar for Japan, wrangling nuclear power like that. The dramatic irony is almost too obvious.

Yeah, in that sense the meaning of 3/11 disaster is more broad. It's a very serious tension between human civilization and nature, or modern technology and nature. So it's bigger than just political terrorism.

I think often about the part in Coda where you talk about your piano—the Steinway and how it's been molded into shape by humans. What do you think is music's relationship to nature?

The symbolism between nature and humans on 3/11 exactly reflects my thought on nature and music. There’s a parallel relationship. Music is like nuclear plants. [laughs] In a way it's true! Music is totally artificial. Still using some material from nature, a piano is assembled with wood and iron. Nuclear power uses material from nature, but it’s been manipulated by humans and it produces something unnatural.

It's almost like an abuse of nature? When you make music are you abusing nature or is just some music an abuse of nature?

In Tokyo because I still have a project, [the tsunami piano]; since I looked and thought about that piano, every time I look at any other piano, I feel kind of pain because they’re an abuse of nature. But it's everything—everything is like that: abusing nature. The piano is a kind of a symbol of modern Western music.

Still, I do want to make my own sound, or make my own music somehow—melodies, harmonies, structure from composition. That's the true desire. It's contradictory, but somehow I have to survive through that.

When Sakamoto arrived in New York, where he’s been living since the ‘90s, he tried his hand at nearly every genre of music: pop, hip-hop, bossa nova, ambient, not-so ambient. He succeeded at all of them. But his most prominent work has come in the form of film scores for directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Brian De Palma, and Bernardo Bertolucci. (Sakamoto won an Oscar for The Last Emperor.) As Coda reveals, his first project after finishing his cancer treatment is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, which Sakamoto felt he could not turn down out of respect to the director’s work. (He’d get a Golden Globe nod out of that.)

Sakamoto is a bit of a cinephile, which you can see in his solo work. The stunner on async is a ghostly synth track “solari,” an imagined soundtrack to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. So naturally, we talk about movies.

I read that you thought Isle of Dogs was “misleading about Japanese-ness.”

I think it's a well-crafted movie. It's aesthetic is so perfect, I think. People could enjoy that. But as a Japanese, you know, to me, it's kind of the same thing again. Old Hollywood movies, they always used their mixed image of Japanese or Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese. It's a wrong stereotypical image of Asian people. So I cannot take it.

More generally, what does American art get wrong about Japan?

Japan's people have been always watching, observing, watching American people, American culture, Western culture. But it's not done same as much as American people looking at Japanese or Asian cultures. It's very...it's not very symmetrical. Because what is the difference between Vietnamese and Japanese for American people?

A long time ago I heard a very funny story. A friend, when he was young, he was traveling in south Texas, and he met an American farmer in Texas. So he introduced himself to the farmer and he said he's from Paris. He's French. But the farmer automatically believed he's from Paris, Texas. “No, no, no, Paris, France.” The farmer couldn't believe that or couldn't tell where it was.

I discovered Yellow Magic Orchestra a few years ago on YouTube. Obviously it's been so informative to so much of American pop and hip hop. But I feel like a lot of Americans have never heard of YMO. Does that bother you at all?

No. Recently a lot of young people have discovered YMO... and that's okay. I don't mind. Early on, YMO was more known in Europe or in U.K. than in the U.S. And definitely in Japan it was very popular. So the gap, why so much gap between there... I don't know. It's strange.

Like, Americans only like American things.

That's true. And the country is so vast.

A lot of K-pop and J-pop takes a lot of inspiration from the work you did with YMO and I feel like that connection has gotten erased or forgotten.

Yeah. But that's okay.

So you don't really worry about it?

No. No. No.

Not even your legacy?

Not at all.

Really? At all?

I'm not interested. Just a tiny bit, just a little.

I guess I keep asking about your legacy because I feel like I get these conversations all the time where music has been dominated by the influence of white people and black people. There's really no mainstream Asian music. But Asians have been contributing to music for a long time time. So when people don't know about those influences, it just makes me worry that people already don't see us.

I don't like the expression of East and West, but there is some kind of a priority still between them. I used to get questions like, "So what's going on with Japanese music? Or, "You are doing Japanese music, right?" No. I'm not. I'm not involved with Japanese pop music right now. Each time, I do get kind of furious—emotional with it, furious emotion. I'm not the ambassador of Japan's culture or Japan.

Yeah, you've been here for half of your life too.

I kept saying that. But, well, I understand why because there are not many Japanese artists, or [artists from] other Asian countries for many years, many decades. It was European/American countries dominating the world for five centuries, so it's almost impossible. I am one of the very rare cases. That's why I can understand the reason I get asked those questions. But it's still very annoying for me. I am just an individual artist.

You don't represent all of Japan.

Not at all. Please. Why do you have to say that I'm a Japanese artist or a Japanese composer, or Japanese pianist? I'm not even a pianist. So it's lack of information, lack of knowledge. Lack of communication maybe.

But slowly it's getting better and better. Very slowly.

Do you keep up with popular music?

No, I rarely listen to pop music. I like more experimental, strange or alternative… ambient.

So is pop music boring to you now?

[laughs] Yeah.